Postwar German Cinema and the Horror Film - Scarecrow Press

xvi Steffen Hantke
fact, led to what Kreimeier calls a distinct “lack of style” (152). 14 Ultimately,
Kreimeier sounds a note that can also be heard in other works of cinematic historiography—that
German expressionism, “this program against ‘reality’ and a
dismissal of any form of realism” (125), only took shape “in, at the most, ten to
fifteen works, which, as ‘classic’ German silent films, today are counted among
the ‘timeless heritage’ of cinematography” (Kreimeier 126). 15 In other words, all
arguments about the absence of a postwar horror film in Germany that start from
the missing resurgence of expressionist filmmaking are flawed to the same degree
as their initial premise.
The second aspect of cinematic historiography that is open to challenge is
the trope of ruptures, which insists on German cultural history as a series of
traumatic interruptions. This narrative has been challenged in regard to 1945, the
so-called Zero Hour: for example, the “twenty-eight West German films of the
years 1945–48 were almost without exception produced and directed by former
employees of the National Socialist Ufa or of other Ufa companies” (Kreimeier
376). 16 But its application to the Third Reich as an exceptional period, a “time
out” so to speak, is also problematic. Eric Rentschler’s analysis of German cinema
during the Third Reich concludes with a brief historical summary that emphasizes
continuity rather than disruption, both in regard to the transition from
the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich and from the Third Reich to the Bonn
Republic. “Feature films in the Third Reich,” Rentschler argues, “were principally
the function of a genre cinema, which in turn was part of an elaborate mass
culture. This cinema sported titles, figures, and materials well-known to Weimar
film which would continue in the postwar era” (215). 17 Given the skewed equation
of Weimar cinema and expressionist style Kreimeier and Elsaesser have
noted, one might expect far more continuity from the cinema of the Weimar to
the cinema of the Bonn Republic. That is to say, if there was a German horror
film before 1933, there is little reason to assume that the twelve years of the
Third Reich would have been able to kill it off once and for all.
In all these aspects of the official historical narrative, the horror film genre
is present as a latent interpretive option, suppressed for a variety of reasons; in
one case it may be an individual critic favorably predisposed toward “artistic”
over popular cinema; in another case, a historiographic model predicated on the
political exoneration of postwar German culture from complicities with that of
the Third Reich. Pieces of the puzzle can be assembled one way or another, but
in every construction, internal contradictions must be suppressed. Historians of
postwar German cinema are not susceptible to the presence of horror films because
they tend to devalue genre in favor of a more radically idiosyncratic and
personal auteurist filmmaking. Historians of the horror film are not susceptible
to its presence because, as scholars studying cinematic genres, their basic model
of genericity is derived from the American film industry. Those who admit to
the existence of a prewar German horror film will fail to recognize postwar
German horror films because they assume that postwar horror cinema must be
expressionistic; or they will fail to look for postwar horror films altogether be-